In life, there are only two things to worry about—
Either you are well or you are sick.
If you are well, there is nothing to worry about,
But if you are sick, there are only two things to worry about—
Either you will get well or you will die.
If you get well, there is nothing to worry about,
But if you die, there are only two things to worry about—
Either you will go to heaven or hell.
If you go to heaven, there is nothing to worry about.
And if you go to hell, you’ll be so busy shaking hands with all your friends
You won’t have time to worry!
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
The Emotions of Coaching: Part 1
This piece will appear in a future ASCA Publication. Enjoy
“Emotion runs the show in sports” – James Loehr “The New Toughness Training for Sports”
The more years I coach, the more I take this to heart. As a coach I am no less “run” by my emotions than the athletes. And my coaching effectiveness is determined as much by my emotions as it is by my knowledge. Many coaches are overdeveloped in one area and underdeveloped in the other. Some are amazing people who get kids to respond to them in almost magical ways. Others are the big brains in the sport, meticulous planners, technicians, relentless task masters who nail down the physical progression. But I think the greatest coaches have both, perhaps not in equal parts, but neither part is greatly deficient.
My goal is in this article is get each of you to reflect on your emotional state at practice, at meets, or any time you are working with the athletes. If you are like I am, you already spend a considerable amount of time reviewing your workouts, learning about training, technique and everything swimming related. I challenge you to put some of that energy and time into emotional evaluation. How do I act around the athletes? What puts me in a good mood? What puts me in a bad mood? What makes me tense? What makes me angry? If I were looking at me each day, as the swimmers do, what would I see? And is that what I want them to see? I think for most of us changing a workout, or teaching a stroke technique differently, is far easier than facing up to your emotional states and then working to overcome them. It’s time to do the hard-work of coaching . . . improving ourselves.
I have used the Eight-Fold Path from Buddhism to illustrate the process of making changes for athletes, but I think it applies equally well to evaluating ourselves emotionally as coaches. Each step on the path can apply to many different things (which is its beauty), so my interpretation is not meant to be complete, but rather illustrative of the emotional side of coaching:
1. Right views (understanding): Become aware of how you feel on deck, dig deep into the real feelings
2. Right purpose (aspiration): Decide what you aspire toward – what needs changing?
3. Right speech: Mind your speech, make sure it is in line with what message you want to send
4. Right conduct: Act in a way that helps you reach your goals
5. Right vocation: Live and work in such a way as to grow emotionally
6. Right effort: Your effort must be sustainable and effective
7. Right awareness (mind control): Learn to be less reactive and more thoughtful during the hard times
8. Right concentration (meditation): Learn how to think and feel deeply.
Ever read parenting books? Or even watch some of the parenting shows like “Supernanny?” I find watching Supernanny fascinating because it always appears that the most out of control kids can be subdued by simple, straightforward rule setting and enforcement. Nothing draconian, nothing severe, but clear and consistent expectations and consequences. But enforcing the rules is very hard for these parents, that’s why they are on the show in the first place – don’t mistake “simple” for “easy.” These parents are unable to do the right thing because of their own emotional shortcomings. The rule enforcement, the consequences, the patience, the self-examination, that is more difficult emotionally than letting them be bad, or just yelling at them when you get fed up. Good parenting is a lot about becoming a better person. I submit that good coaching is the same.
I quote here from a well-known article by Anson Dorrance, soccer coach at the University of North Carolina, titled “Coaching Women: Going Against the Instincts of My Gender”: “And while we, as coaches, never want to cease learning about our sport, ultimately, coaching development ceases to be about finding newer ways to organize practice. In other words, you soon stop collecting drills. Your coaching development shifts to observing how to support and motivate your players, and how to lead them to perform at higher and higher levels.” Technical learning needs to be ongoing, but it’s only a piece of the coaching puzzle. I’m at a place where I need to dig into myself to become a better coach.
So how did your season go? Great? Poor? Or, as usual, a mixed bag? How will you do better next season? Instead of chasing the next thing, or the magic set, or the newest piece of equipment, look at how you connected (or failed to connect) emotionally with your athletes. Are the ones doing well the ones you get along with best? Are they the ones you like being around the most? Or the ones that react most positively to your personality? The answer is likely yes to those questions and that’s natural. But which is the cart and which is the horse here? Are they getting the extra positive attention because they are doing the right things, or are they doing the right things because they are getting extra positive attention?
The challenge of coaching is investing the time and energy into the kids who you don’t connect with as well. Sometimes they are just the more quiet ones, or those who don’t seem to want to be there, or are difficult, or annoying. This next quote is from a recent article on espn.com by Bill Simmons about the Lakers coach Phil Jackson after his retirement. Phil is known for his 11 championship rings, and having coached Jordan and Kobe, but I think this is a majorly overlooked part of why he is one of the great coaches of all time: "Steve Kerr told me once that what made Jackson special -- and Popovich too -- was that he cared about his twelfth guy as much as his best guy. He spent time with his players, bought them gifts, thought about what made them tick. He connected with them, sold them on the concept of a team, stuck up for them when they needed him. His actual coaching -- calling plays, working refs, figuring out lineups and everything else that we see -- was a smaller piece of a much bigger picture. His players competed for him for many reasons, but mainly because they truly believed Jackson cared about them. Which he definitely did." Are you prepared to care about all of your athletes like that? What stops you from doing so now? What can you do to change that?
At the club level we have the unique problem of coaching boys and girls together in the same group. Not many sports coach boys and girls together. Some run practices congruently, or practice together up a point, but not many do the same workout day in and day out for both boys and girls outside of a recreation level. I think of diving, gymnastics, track, not a long list for sure. Why do we train together in swimming? Out of necessity in one respect (what other sport dares to put 90+ kids in 25y by 50m area?), but also because in swimming girls can keep up with boys, or at least close enough to do the same workouts. But having them together has created some unusual social dynamics that do not occur in sports where the genders train separately.
We sometimes talk about the girls being more comfortable competing against the boys than each other in practice. Would women basketball players do better competing against men? Or in soccer? Doubtful, but maybe if they had grown up practicing with the boys they would. Do the women swimmers have better or worse leadership skills, competitiveness, practice habits, or confidence than women in other sports who practice same gendered? Sounds like a good sports-psych study to me. Or how about the men. Do male swimmers have better or worse abilities in all those areas for having trained with women? We often view the boys as immune to some degree, that they would “do fine” in any environment, but that is hard to believe. Compare the male culture at a military academy sports team to that of your mixed gendered club team, it’s hard to say those differences amount to nothing. And getting your butt kicked by another guy is one thing, but by younger girls is quite another.
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but from a coaching perspective I don’t think we would coach a same gendered group in exactly the way we currently coach a mixed gendered group. And because of that fact, a higher demand is placed on us as coaches because we have to be aware of whether our style works better for one gender or another. And if you intend on switching styles i.e. working with female athletes fundamentally different then male athletes (which most of us do either by design or instinct) that is yet another challenge. Yes, my claim is we have it harder than if we were coaching a single gendered group (sorry college coaches).
Ok, so, what emotional challenges does that reality present? I don’t want to get into the literature about the differences between men and women too deeply, as others have done a fine job of this before me. Here is a straight-forward illustration of how men and women often have different goals in conversation. Deborah Tannen in “You Just Don’t Understand” asserts that women have “rapport-talk” and men have “report-talk.” The idea is that women tend to use language to establish an emotional relation with the other person, a connection, being in-sync, demonstrating a sameness, an understanding. She also calls this “affiliative talk.” While men tend to convey information about impersonal topics, report about a situation. For women the act of talking itself, even if it is sharing information that seems inconsequential or irrelevant, matters a great deal, while with men not-so. Some arm-chair evolutionary sociology will claim that historically women needed rapport talk to establish connections and safety back at home, while men needed report talk to do the hunting and fighting. Ever try to have a “report” conversation with a female athlete that from your end is about changes she needs to make to her swimming, and she walks away thinking “Why does he always yell at me and hate me?”
Figure out where you sit on the spectrum of report v. rapport talk yourself. And that’s not as simple as being male makes you a report talker, as I venture to guess many of the great male women’s coaches have a sense of rapport talk. Go further though and notice how you respond when women have a successful performance in practice or a meet and how you respond when men do. Then do the reverse, how you respond to poor meet or practice performance in a male swimmer and female swimmer. Do you get more excited for one over the other? More disappointed or angry? Not sure? Ask a coach you work with, someone you trust, to assess you in this way.
It’s such a delicate balance, coaching both genders well at the same time, and that’s why so few teams are consistently equal in boy and girl performance. One of my pet peeves is how coaches unintentionally emasculate the boys. As if wearing a Speedo in front of girls (especially if you are skinny and small for your age) isn’t enough, you sometimes get beat by girls (and sometimes younger girls!). So given that, why do coaches often put down the boys for getting beat by the girls? You don’t have to say so directly to create that effect, just get more excited about the girls’ performance and act disappointed in your guys and you’ve done it. Another way to emasculate is taking the girls attention. If all the girls spend their time talking to the male coach and each other (and not the boys) that will make them feel less than. If you are a boy in that situation you’ve got to be thinking, “Screw swimming. How about I go play baseball or lacrosse with all guys and feel like a man instead of getting my butt kicked here and feeling like a wimp.”
Sometimes you hear coaches complaining about how their boys aren’t tough, or they aren’t staying on the team, or they are small and weak, as if they just happened to be in a town that has a genetically poor crop of boys. Try letting your guys be guys a little, let them stand around a bit and talk about how fast they are, trying to look tough, crack some jokes with them and help make them into men. If you don’t do that, and you are in a girl-dominated culture, with all their attention going to you and all your attention going to them, the only boys who last on the team are ones that are frankly like the girls. You want big, tough, aggressive, fast boys? Then make them! Let them race, talk a little trash, act tough, lift a few dumbbells, now and then even goof-off a bit (heaven forbid!) and you’ll find they start doing better.
In the 2nd part of this series, I intend on exploring the challenges new coaches face building trust with the athletes, and what it takes emotionally to work effectively with teenagers.
“Emotion runs the show in sports” – James Loehr “The New Toughness Training for Sports”
The more years I coach, the more I take this to heart. As a coach I am no less “run” by my emotions than the athletes. And my coaching effectiveness is determined as much by my emotions as it is by my knowledge. Many coaches are overdeveloped in one area and underdeveloped in the other. Some are amazing people who get kids to respond to them in almost magical ways. Others are the big brains in the sport, meticulous planners, technicians, relentless task masters who nail down the physical progression. But I think the greatest coaches have both, perhaps not in equal parts, but neither part is greatly deficient.
My goal is in this article is get each of you to reflect on your emotional state at practice, at meets, or any time you are working with the athletes. If you are like I am, you already spend a considerable amount of time reviewing your workouts, learning about training, technique and everything swimming related. I challenge you to put some of that energy and time into emotional evaluation. How do I act around the athletes? What puts me in a good mood? What puts me in a bad mood? What makes me tense? What makes me angry? If I were looking at me each day, as the swimmers do, what would I see? And is that what I want them to see? I think for most of us changing a workout, or teaching a stroke technique differently, is far easier than facing up to your emotional states and then working to overcome them. It’s time to do the hard-work of coaching . . . improving ourselves.
I have used the Eight-Fold Path from Buddhism to illustrate the process of making changes for athletes, but I think it applies equally well to evaluating ourselves emotionally as coaches. Each step on the path can apply to many different things (which is its beauty), so my interpretation is not meant to be complete, but rather illustrative of the emotional side of coaching:
1. Right views (understanding): Become aware of how you feel on deck, dig deep into the real feelings
2. Right purpose (aspiration): Decide what you aspire toward – what needs changing?
3. Right speech: Mind your speech, make sure it is in line with what message you want to send
4. Right conduct: Act in a way that helps you reach your goals
5. Right vocation: Live and work in such a way as to grow emotionally
6. Right effort: Your effort must be sustainable and effective
7. Right awareness (mind control): Learn to be less reactive and more thoughtful during the hard times
8. Right concentration (meditation): Learn how to think and feel deeply.
Ever read parenting books? Or even watch some of the parenting shows like “Supernanny?” I find watching Supernanny fascinating because it always appears that the most out of control kids can be subdued by simple, straightforward rule setting and enforcement. Nothing draconian, nothing severe, but clear and consistent expectations and consequences. But enforcing the rules is very hard for these parents, that’s why they are on the show in the first place – don’t mistake “simple” for “easy.” These parents are unable to do the right thing because of their own emotional shortcomings. The rule enforcement, the consequences, the patience, the self-examination, that is more difficult emotionally than letting them be bad, or just yelling at them when you get fed up. Good parenting is a lot about becoming a better person. I submit that good coaching is the same.
I quote here from a well-known article by Anson Dorrance, soccer coach at the University of North Carolina, titled “Coaching Women: Going Against the Instincts of My Gender”: “And while we, as coaches, never want to cease learning about our sport, ultimately, coaching development ceases to be about finding newer ways to organize practice. In other words, you soon stop collecting drills. Your coaching development shifts to observing how to support and motivate your players, and how to lead them to perform at higher and higher levels.” Technical learning needs to be ongoing, but it’s only a piece of the coaching puzzle. I’m at a place where I need to dig into myself to become a better coach.
So how did your season go? Great? Poor? Or, as usual, a mixed bag? How will you do better next season? Instead of chasing the next thing, or the magic set, or the newest piece of equipment, look at how you connected (or failed to connect) emotionally with your athletes. Are the ones doing well the ones you get along with best? Are they the ones you like being around the most? Or the ones that react most positively to your personality? The answer is likely yes to those questions and that’s natural. But which is the cart and which is the horse here? Are they getting the extra positive attention because they are doing the right things, or are they doing the right things because they are getting extra positive attention?
The challenge of coaching is investing the time and energy into the kids who you don’t connect with as well. Sometimes they are just the more quiet ones, or those who don’t seem to want to be there, or are difficult, or annoying. This next quote is from a recent article on espn.com by Bill Simmons about the Lakers coach Phil Jackson after his retirement. Phil is known for his 11 championship rings, and having coached Jordan and Kobe, but I think this is a majorly overlooked part of why he is one of the great coaches of all time: "Steve Kerr told me once that what made Jackson special -- and Popovich too -- was that he cared about his twelfth guy as much as his best guy. He spent time with his players, bought them gifts, thought about what made them tick. He connected with them, sold them on the concept of a team, stuck up for them when they needed him. His actual coaching -- calling plays, working refs, figuring out lineups and everything else that we see -- was a smaller piece of a much bigger picture. His players competed for him for many reasons, but mainly because they truly believed Jackson cared about them. Which he definitely did." Are you prepared to care about all of your athletes like that? What stops you from doing so now? What can you do to change that?
At the club level we have the unique problem of coaching boys and girls together in the same group. Not many sports coach boys and girls together. Some run practices congruently, or practice together up a point, but not many do the same workout day in and day out for both boys and girls outside of a recreation level. I think of diving, gymnastics, track, not a long list for sure. Why do we train together in swimming? Out of necessity in one respect (what other sport dares to put 90+ kids in 25y by 50m area?), but also because in swimming girls can keep up with boys, or at least close enough to do the same workouts. But having them together has created some unusual social dynamics that do not occur in sports where the genders train separately.
We sometimes talk about the girls being more comfortable competing against the boys than each other in practice. Would women basketball players do better competing against men? Or in soccer? Doubtful, but maybe if they had grown up practicing with the boys they would. Do the women swimmers have better or worse leadership skills, competitiveness, practice habits, or confidence than women in other sports who practice same gendered? Sounds like a good sports-psych study to me. Or how about the men. Do male swimmers have better or worse abilities in all those areas for having trained with women? We often view the boys as immune to some degree, that they would “do fine” in any environment, but that is hard to believe. Compare the male culture at a military academy sports team to that of your mixed gendered club team, it’s hard to say those differences amount to nothing. And getting your butt kicked by another guy is one thing, but by younger girls is quite another.
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but from a coaching perspective I don’t think we would coach a same gendered group in exactly the way we currently coach a mixed gendered group. And because of that fact, a higher demand is placed on us as coaches because we have to be aware of whether our style works better for one gender or another. And if you intend on switching styles i.e. working with female athletes fundamentally different then male athletes (which most of us do either by design or instinct) that is yet another challenge. Yes, my claim is we have it harder than if we were coaching a single gendered group (sorry college coaches).
Ok, so, what emotional challenges does that reality present? I don’t want to get into the literature about the differences between men and women too deeply, as others have done a fine job of this before me. Here is a straight-forward illustration of how men and women often have different goals in conversation. Deborah Tannen in “You Just Don’t Understand” asserts that women have “rapport-talk” and men have “report-talk.” The idea is that women tend to use language to establish an emotional relation with the other person, a connection, being in-sync, demonstrating a sameness, an understanding. She also calls this “affiliative talk.” While men tend to convey information about impersonal topics, report about a situation. For women the act of talking itself, even if it is sharing information that seems inconsequential or irrelevant, matters a great deal, while with men not-so. Some arm-chair evolutionary sociology will claim that historically women needed rapport talk to establish connections and safety back at home, while men needed report talk to do the hunting and fighting. Ever try to have a “report” conversation with a female athlete that from your end is about changes she needs to make to her swimming, and she walks away thinking “Why does he always yell at me and hate me?”
Figure out where you sit on the spectrum of report v. rapport talk yourself. And that’s not as simple as being male makes you a report talker, as I venture to guess many of the great male women’s coaches have a sense of rapport talk. Go further though and notice how you respond when women have a successful performance in practice or a meet and how you respond when men do. Then do the reverse, how you respond to poor meet or practice performance in a male swimmer and female swimmer. Do you get more excited for one over the other? More disappointed or angry? Not sure? Ask a coach you work with, someone you trust, to assess you in this way.
It’s such a delicate balance, coaching both genders well at the same time, and that’s why so few teams are consistently equal in boy and girl performance. One of my pet peeves is how coaches unintentionally emasculate the boys. As if wearing a Speedo in front of girls (especially if you are skinny and small for your age) isn’t enough, you sometimes get beat by girls (and sometimes younger girls!). So given that, why do coaches often put down the boys for getting beat by the girls? You don’t have to say so directly to create that effect, just get more excited about the girls’ performance and act disappointed in your guys and you’ve done it. Another way to emasculate is taking the girls attention. If all the girls spend their time talking to the male coach and each other (and not the boys) that will make them feel less than. If you are a boy in that situation you’ve got to be thinking, “Screw swimming. How about I go play baseball or lacrosse with all guys and feel like a man instead of getting my butt kicked here and feeling like a wimp.”
Sometimes you hear coaches complaining about how their boys aren’t tough, or they aren’t staying on the team, or they are small and weak, as if they just happened to be in a town that has a genetically poor crop of boys. Try letting your guys be guys a little, let them stand around a bit and talk about how fast they are, trying to look tough, crack some jokes with them and help make them into men. If you don’t do that, and you are in a girl-dominated culture, with all their attention going to you and all your attention going to them, the only boys who last on the team are ones that are frankly like the girls. You want big, tough, aggressive, fast boys? Then make them! Let them race, talk a little trash, act tough, lift a few dumbbells, now and then even goof-off a bit (heaven forbid!) and you’ll find they start doing better.
In the 2nd part of this series, I intend on exploring the challenges new coaches face building trust with the athletes, and what it takes emotionally to work effectively with teenagers.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Be Like Phil
Phil Jackson retired after the Lakers lost to the Mavericks. He is one of the coaches I look up to. Not just because of his success (11 titles) but how he went about getting them. People talk about why Phil was so successful in terms of his triangle offense, his calm demeanor, his intense preparation, his Buddhism, but this quote may be the most correct, and it's one of the many reasons why I try to be like Phil:
"Steve Kerr told me once that what made Jackson special -- and Popovich too -- was that he cared about his twelfth guy as much as his best guy. He spent time with his players, bought them gifts, thought about what made them tick. He connected with them, sold them on the concept of a team, stuck up for them when they needed him. His actual coaching -- calling plays, working refs, figuring out lineups and everything else that we see -- was a smaller piece of a much bigger picture. His players competed for him for many reasons, but mainly because they truly believed Jackson cared about them. Which he definitely did."
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons%2F110513&sportCat=nba
"Steve Kerr told me once that what made Jackson special -- and Popovich too -- was that he cared about his twelfth guy as much as his best guy. He spent time with his players, bought them gifts, thought about what made them tick. He connected with them, sold them on the concept of a team, stuck up for them when they needed him. His actual coaching -- calling plays, working refs, figuring out lineups and everything else that we see -- was a smaller piece of a much bigger picture. His players competed for him for many reasons, but mainly because they truly believed Jackson cared about them. Which he definitely did."
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons%2F110513&sportCat=nba
Sunday, May 8, 2011
"Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain"
I've just finished a great book titled "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain" by Sharon Begley about neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to change physically) and its intersection with Buddhist meditation. The major message fits with recent research into talent, that practice and training can improve things previously thought to be unchangeable. There is less and less that is determined at birth. In particular, these passages deal with changing one's ability to focus, feel compassion, calmness and base-line happiness:
"Virtually all of biomedical science focuses on getting people up to the zeroth level and nothing more. As long as someone can attain nonsickness, that is deemed sufficient. As Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace put it, 'Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated. We in the modern West have grown accustomed to the assumption that the 'normal' mind, in the sense of one free from clinical mental illness, is a healthy one. But a 'normal mind' is still subject to many types of mental distress, including anxiety, frustration, restlessness, boredom, and resentment.'"
"There is a tremendous lacuna in our worldview, where training is seen as important for strength, for physical agility, for athletic ability, for musical ability -- for everything except emotions. The Buddhists say these are skills, too, and are trainable like any others."
Psychology in just the past 20 years is now developing what's generally referred to as "Positive Psychology" or the study of people who are above average in mental health. The best analogy to what we are talking about here is the difference between a person who is of average body weight, blood pressure, and overall physical fitness to a top Olympic level athlete. Psychology was previously occupied only with getting the unhealthy person to the normal level, and now there is a reality that through mental training we can get go up from normal, perhaps even to the Olympic level of emotions!
"As researchers probe the power of meditation and other techniques to alter the brain and allow it to function at the highest levels, we are therefore poised at the brink of "above-the-line" science -- of studying people whose powers of attention are far above the norm, whose wellsprings of compassion dwarf those of most people, who have successfully set their happiness baseline at a point that most mortals achieve only transiently before tumbling down to something comfortably above depression but far from what may be possible. What we learn from them may provide the key to raising everyone -- or at least everyone who chooses to engage in necessary mental training -- to that level. Neuroplasticity will provide the key to realizing positive mental and emotional functioning. The effects of mental training, as shown in the brains of accomplished Buddhist meditators, suggest what humans can achieve."
I started writing those little handouts on Mental Training (see below for an example) and giving them to my swimmers years ago. My focus then was on thought habits that directly connect to physical performance. Now I feel I need to broaden my approach to include training which improves overall emotional strength. Neuroscience has shown that even cognition is closely intertwined with neurons that deal with emotion, so nothing is truly "unemotional," and nothing is untrainable!
"Virtually all of biomedical science focuses on getting people up to the zeroth level and nothing more. As long as someone can attain nonsickness, that is deemed sufficient. As Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace put it, 'Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated. We in the modern West have grown accustomed to the assumption that the 'normal' mind, in the sense of one free from clinical mental illness, is a healthy one. But a 'normal mind' is still subject to many types of mental distress, including anxiety, frustration, restlessness, boredom, and resentment.'"
"There is a tremendous lacuna in our worldview, where training is seen as important for strength, for physical agility, for athletic ability, for musical ability -- for everything except emotions. The Buddhists say these are skills, too, and are trainable like any others."
Psychology in just the past 20 years is now developing what's generally referred to as "Positive Psychology" or the study of people who are above average in mental health. The best analogy to what we are talking about here is the difference between a person who is of average body weight, blood pressure, and overall physical fitness to a top Olympic level athlete. Psychology was previously occupied only with getting the unhealthy person to the normal level, and now there is a reality that through mental training we can get go up from normal, perhaps even to the Olympic level of emotions!
"As researchers probe the power of meditation and other techniques to alter the brain and allow it to function at the highest levels, we are therefore poised at the brink of "above-the-line" science -- of studying people whose powers of attention are far above the norm, whose wellsprings of compassion dwarf those of most people, who have successfully set their happiness baseline at a point that most mortals achieve only transiently before tumbling down to something comfortably above depression but far from what may be possible. What we learn from them may provide the key to raising everyone -- or at least everyone who chooses to engage in necessary mental training -- to that level. Neuroplasticity will provide the key to realizing positive mental and emotional functioning. The effects of mental training, as shown in the brains of accomplished Buddhist meditators, suggest what humans can achieve."
I started writing those little handouts on Mental Training (see below for an example) and giving them to my swimmers years ago. My focus then was on thought habits that directly connect to physical performance. Now I feel I need to broaden my approach to include training which improves overall emotional strength. Neuroscience has shown that even cognition is closely intertwined with neurons that deal with emotion, so nothing is truly "unemotional," and nothing is untrainable!
Satisfied Mind
The lyrics to a great song by Johnny Cash. Reassuring in tough times:
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
Once I was waitin'
In fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for
To get a start in life's game
Then suddenly it happened
I lost every dime
But I'm richer by far
With a satisfied mind
Money can't buy back
Your youth when you're old
Or a friend when you're lonely
Or a love that's grown cold
The wealthiest person
Is a pauper at times
Compared to the man
With a satisfied mind
When my life has ended
And my time has run out
My friends and my loved ones
I'll leave there's no doubt
But one thing's for certain
When it comes my time
I'll leave this old world
With a satisfied mind
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
Once I was waitin'
In fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for
To get a start in life's game
Then suddenly it happened
I lost every dime
But I'm richer by far
With a satisfied mind
Money can't buy back
Your youth when you're old
Or a friend when you're lonely
Or a love that's grown cold
The wealthiest person
Is a pauper at times
Compared to the man
With a satisfied mind
When my life has ended
And my time has run out
My friends and my loved ones
I'll leave there's no doubt
But one thing's for certain
When it comes my time
I'll leave this old world
With a satisfied mind
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
Friday, May 6, 2011
"Ownership of Teaching" by Ikkostraining
New post on Ikkostraining on "Ownership of Teaching." Check it out, it's the good stuff.
http://ikkostraining.wordpress.com/
http://ikkostraining.wordpress.com/
Monday, May 2, 2011
Self-Deception, Bullshit and Spin
Self-Deception
I've been thinking and reading about self-deception. It's fascinating to realize that a person can think they are doing one thing but in fact are doing another. A person, let's call him Bob, could genuinely hold the belief "I work hard at my job everyday and I'm doing well" but the truth is Bob is not working hard and not doing well. And let's assume this isn't a simple case of error, that somehow Bob thought his job entailed doing X when it really entailed doing Y -- he just didn't know any better. In this example Bob goes around everyday, with his head held high, believing he is doing great. People keep trying to give him hints to the contrary, and evidence pops up almost daily, but it doesn't seem to impact Bob at all. He sincerely believes he is working hard and doing well. I imagine he could even pass a lie detector test. Ok, but why does Bob believe he is doing a good job if there is evidence to the contrary? Is he just dumb? Is he lying to everyone and knows he isn't any good? If either of those are true then this isn't really self-deception, its ignorance or lying. How did Bob end up in this mess? Where did his thinking go wrong? Let's explore some options.
Bob could have what's called a "motivational belief," that's a belief which is formed because of an underlying motivation. Bob's underlying motivation could be that he wants to be successful, or looked upon as successful. That motivation forms a belief (despite the evidence)in himself as a good, hard-worker. Bob wants to believe that about himself (who doesn't?) and thus he screens his feedback to confirm his belief. The evidence which says he is doing well, he remembers: "Look, another example of my good work!" And the evidence which contradicts his belief he dismisses, creating lots of phony reasons why the contradictory evidence is incorrect. Bob's belief in himself as a good, hard-worker is not just a matter of ego, it's functional. Bob wants to keep his job, and if he ranks himself highly, he can influence others to believe the same. Hard to promote yourself when you don't think you are doing a good job.
Unfortunately, it's not just Bob who deceives himself, it's all of us. Bob's main instance of self-deception is in his workplace, for us it may be somewhere else. Explaining our own misfortunes inaccurately, personally or professionally, may be instances of self-deception. We have little stories to explain away why something went wrong, and if those stories are truly believed (sometimes they are only half-believed) but incorrect, we may be no better than Bob. Why do we end up deceiving ourselves? Staying blind to evidence right in front of our faces? Deaf to the voices of those around us? That leads us to our next potential explanation for Bob's self-deception -- fear of the consequences of the truth.
We deceive ourselves because it's easier than facing the truth. The truth about ourselves is often not complimentary. It's hard to hear, it can be painful, so much so it's not possible to face. So we deny and lie to ourselves. But what's worse than the truth is the consequence of knowing the truth, you'd have to change. You'd have to admit you are wrong and that you need to do something (usually something you don't want to do) different. Well, forget all that, let's just convince ourselves that everything is ok instead.
That is, if we are not strong. The stronger you are as a person, the more centered and balanced you are, the more you can face those truths. Self-deceivers are weak deep-down. They have to lie to themselves for protection from reality.
Bullshit
Fun little read on this topic, written by a philosophy professor. What characterizes bullshit is the misrepresentation of intentions. You don't actually have to lie to do that, you can use the truth to misrepresent yourself or your intentions: "For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony." Yes, the bullshitter is a phony. It's fakery clothed as reason.
For instance, the bullshitter is saying he will help you, but the real end is to make himself look like he is helping you. The end is not your aid, it's his gain through the appearance of aiding you. He may actually need to help you in order to achieve that gain, which is why the bullshitter is so hard to pin down. "I did help him, like I said I would."
But people are very good at smelling a rat, they know when they are being bullshitted. Even children can sense this. The manifestation of smelling a rat is distrust of the bullshitter, and rightfully so. They think "Yeah, you are saying that, and you may do that, but I know you are full of shit."
Spin
Spin is pretty easy to define, hard to pick out. Spin is the act of manipulating results or facts or events to suit an agenda. Anything can be spun, and most everything is. Spin is easy because of the problems of knowledge, the field of philosophy known as epistemology. It's hard to truly know anything (and by "know" here I mean having true, justified belief, although that definition is just one of many for "know"). So we can spin the results of sports performance very easily to suit our predetermined view:
1. They swam fast (objectively measured by time). The spin is in the "why." Because of good coaching, because of the previous coach, because they were trained right, because they were rested right, or because they weren't trained hard enough and were too rested (mid-season meet for instance). What's the truth?
2. They swam slowly. Why? Because of bad coaching, because of the previous coach, because they are just a bad group of athletes, because they weren't trained hard enough, they were trained too hard, they were too rested, they were under-rested. What's the truth? Pick your spin.
Spin is part deception, part lie, part bullshit. And some people spin to self-deceive, convince themselves they are safe, things are going ok, that reality isn't harsh truth, it actually fits into a worldview where they come out on top.
Ethics
This is all well and good if the self-deceiver, the bullshitter or the spinner doesn't affect you. But what if they do? Do you blame them? Can you change them?
The blame issue depends on how strongly you fault people for their own failings. They are failings of character, of moral strength, ethics overridden by self-interest. Changing people like this is very difficult because they fundamentally don't accept input that contradicts their intentions. Why would they believe you when you call them out?
What fascinates me about the self-deceiver, or the person who believes his/her own bullshit and spin, is how far astray they have gone. It's not just that they are wrong, that's common enough, it's that they have bought their own bullshit! That's stunning.
So how do you, or I, avoid falling into this problem ourselves? First, continually work on strengthening yourself emotionally so you can face the truth of reality. Second, be open to change. Third, surround yourself with good people who themselves are emotionally strong and open to change, and then listen to them!
I've been thinking and reading about self-deception. It's fascinating to realize that a person can think they are doing one thing but in fact are doing another. A person, let's call him Bob, could genuinely hold the belief "I work hard at my job everyday and I'm doing well" but the truth is Bob is not working hard and not doing well. And let's assume this isn't a simple case of error, that somehow Bob thought his job entailed doing X when it really entailed doing Y -- he just didn't know any better. In this example Bob goes around everyday, with his head held high, believing he is doing great. People keep trying to give him hints to the contrary, and evidence pops up almost daily, but it doesn't seem to impact Bob at all. He sincerely believes he is working hard and doing well. I imagine he could even pass a lie detector test. Ok, but why does Bob believe he is doing a good job if there is evidence to the contrary? Is he just dumb? Is he lying to everyone and knows he isn't any good? If either of those are true then this isn't really self-deception, its ignorance or lying. How did Bob end up in this mess? Where did his thinking go wrong? Let's explore some options.
Bob could have what's called a "motivational belief," that's a belief which is formed because of an underlying motivation. Bob's underlying motivation could be that he wants to be successful, or looked upon as successful. That motivation forms a belief (despite the evidence)in himself as a good, hard-worker. Bob wants to believe that about himself (who doesn't?) and thus he screens his feedback to confirm his belief. The evidence which says he is doing well, he remembers: "Look, another example of my good work!" And the evidence which contradicts his belief he dismisses, creating lots of phony reasons why the contradictory evidence is incorrect. Bob's belief in himself as a good, hard-worker is not just a matter of ego, it's functional. Bob wants to keep his job, and if he ranks himself highly, he can influence others to believe the same. Hard to promote yourself when you don't think you are doing a good job.
Unfortunately, it's not just Bob who deceives himself, it's all of us. Bob's main instance of self-deception is in his workplace, for us it may be somewhere else. Explaining our own misfortunes inaccurately, personally or professionally, may be instances of self-deception. We have little stories to explain away why something went wrong, and if those stories are truly believed (sometimes they are only half-believed) but incorrect, we may be no better than Bob. Why do we end up deceiving ourselves? Staying blind to evidence right in front of our faces? Deaf to the voices of those around us? That leads us to our next potential explanation for Bob's self-deception -- fear of the consequences of the truth.
We deceive ourselves because it's easier than facing the truth. The truth about ourselves is often not complimentary. It's hard to hear, it can be painful, so much so it's not possible to face. So we deny and lie to ourselves. But what's worse than the truth is the consequence of knowing the truth, you'd have to change. You'd have to admit you are wrong and that you need to do something (usually something you don't want to do) different. Well, forget all that, let's just convince ourselves that everything is ok instead.
That is, if we are not strong. The stronger you are as a person, the more centered and balanced you are, the more you can face those truths. Self-deceivers are weak deep-down. They have to lie to themselves for protection from reality.
Bullshit
Fun little read on this topic, written by a philosophy professor. What characterizes bullshit is the misrepresentation of intentions. You don't actually have to lie to do that, you can use the truth to misrepresent yourself or your intentions: "For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony." Yes, the bullshitter is a phony. It's fakery clothed as reason.
For instance, the bullshitter is saying he will help you, but the real end is to make himself look like he is helping you. The end is not your aid, it's his gain through the appearance of aiding you. He may actually need to help you in order to achieve that gain, which is why the bullshitter is so hard to pin down. "I did help him, like I said I would."
But people are very good at smelling a rat, they know when they are being bullshitted. Even children can sense this. The manifestation of smelling a rat is distrust of the bullshitter, and rightfully so. They think "Yeah, you are saying that, and you may do that, but I know you are full of shit."
Spin
Spin is pretty easy to define, hard to pick out. Spin is the act of manipulating results or facts or events to suit an agenda. Anything can be spun, and most everything is. Spin is easy because of the problems of knowledge, the field of philosophy known as epistemology. It's hard to truly know anything (and by "know" here I mean having true, justified belief, although that definition is just one of many for "know"). So we can spin the results of sports performance very easily to suit our predetermined view:
1. They swam fast (objectively measured by time). The spin is in the "why." Because of good coaching, because of the previous coach, because they were trained right, because they were rested right, or because they weren't trained hard enough and were too rested (mid-season meet for instance). What's the truth?
2. They swam slowly. Why? Because of bad coaching, because of the previous coach, because they are just a bad group of athletes, because they weren't trained hard enough, they were trained too hard, they were too rested, they were under-rested. What's the truth? Pick your spin.
Spin is part deception, part lie, part bullshit. And some people spin to self-deceive, convince themselves they are safe, things are going ok, that reality isn't harsh truth, it actually fits into a worldview where they come out on top.
Ethics
This is all well and good if the self-deceiver, the bullshitter or the spinner doesn't affect you. But what if they do? Do you blame them? Can you change them?
The blame issue depends on how strongly you fault people for their own failings. They are failings of character, of moral strength, ethics overridden by self-interest. Changing people like this is very difficult because they fundamentally don't accept input that contradicts their intentions. Why would they believe you when you call them out?
What fascinates me about the self-deceiver, or the person who believes his/her own bullshit and spin, is how far astray they have gone. It's not just that they are wrong, that's common enough, it's that they have bought their own bullshit! That's stunning.
So how do you, or I, avoid falling into this problem ourselves? First, continually work on strengthening yourself emotionally so you can face the truth of reality. Second, be open to change. Third, surround yourself with good people who themselves are emotionally strong and open to change, and then listen to them!
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